Medical researchers at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich have discovered why a new class of anticoagulants designed to reduce the risk of strokes can—in rare cases—increase the incidence of heart attacks.

Medication errors are a common patient safety issue in the United States, with 1.5 million adverse drug events reported annually, often occurring in a home or other outpatient setting. Past research has indicated that inadequate ...

Starting in 1993 and ending in 2001, ten academic medical centers in the United States screened 76,685 men and 78,216 women for prostate, lung, colorectal and ovarian cancers. The question was whether yearly screening could ...

When flawed clinical research is reported in the media with hype and sensationalism, it has the potential to have a devastating effect on patients, physicians, the scientific community and eventually society as a whole.

Pregnant women face a number of choices. Most are pretty noncontroversial: Don't smoke or use drugs; avoid raw fish and eggs; get lots of rest. But one dilemma some pregnant women face is less intuitive: whether and how to ...

Developing a broader skill of empathy is a more realistic goal for medical students and doctors than urging them to be more compassionate. Writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Dr David Jeffrey, an honorary ...

A review and analysis of nearly 200 studies involving 129,000 medical students in 47 countries found that the prevalence of depression or depressive symptoms was 27 percent, that 11 percent reported suicidal ideation during ...

New research has identified a higher prevalence of disability among students in U.S. allopathic medical schools (2.7 percent) than prior studies (0.3 percent to 0.6 percent), according to a study appearing in the December ...

Medicine

Medicine is the art and science of healing. It encompasses a range of health care practices evolved to maintain and restore health by the prevention and treatment of illness.

Contemporary medicine applies health science, biomedical research, and medical technology to diagnose and treat injury and disease, typically through medication, surgery, or some other form of therapy. The word medicine is derived from the Latin ars medicina, meaning the art of healing.

Though medical technology and clinical expertise are pivotal to contemporary medicine, successful face-to-face relief of actual suffering continues to require the application of ordinary human feeling and compassion, known in English as bedside manner.